DEI as the Bridge to Sustainable Culture

Diversity, equity, and inclusion work is easy to announce and hard to sustain. In the 11th episode of Season 3 of CultureClub X, host Nicole Patrick sits down with Kellie Wagner, founder and CEO of Collective, a DEI lab, to unpack what actually makes inclusion stick inside a company culture. Kellie launched Collective to change the way the workplace engages with its most marginalized team members, and her consultancy has since worked with companies like Spotify, Glossier, Food52, and Taco Bell.

Her approach did not start in a classroom. Kellie spent almost a decade in tech, thinking about how products create a sense of belonging and access for customers, before she noticed the exact same barriers playing out for employees inside the workplace. That realization pulled her into grassroots, employee-led efforts like DEI councils and employee resource groups, where she saw how much power sits with the people closest to the problems.

The core question of the conversation is a practical one: how do leaders move DEI from a set of pretty words in a document to something absorbed into the everyday culture? Kellie frames DEI less as a siloed program and more as a lens laid on top of how an organization already works, and she is candid about the moments where good intentions quietly fall apart.

Where senior leaders should actually start

Kellie says the question she hears most often is simply where to begin. Culture and DEI work can tempt leaders to boil the ocean or stay permanently reactive to whatever problem pops up next. After surveying thousands of employees, Collective's research surfaced three buckets where senior leaders can drive the most impact on belonging and retention.

The first is trust, across peers, the leadership team, and the broader organization. The second is effective working relationships, especially the ability to communicate and to give and receive feedback with people who are different from you. The third is empowerment and advocacy, because a paycheck alone no longer keeps people who now have far more options. Get those three right, Kellie argues, and you create a strong sense of belonging that helps retain your best talent.

Why culture has to live in both behaviors and structures

For any of these pillars to embed, Kellie argues, leaders have to work them at two levels at once. There are the individual skills and behaviors that strengthen trust and relationships, and there are the organizational structures and people processes that either reinforce or undermine them.

Transparency in decision making ties directly to trust. The way manager and director relationships are structured shapes growth and development. Behaviors matter, but so do the systems those behaviors live inside, which is why she pushes leaders to look past posters and slogans. Solutions will look different in every company, she notes, but the discipline of working both levels at once is what carries a value from an intention into a lived reality.

How do you operationalize values so they stick

Plenty of organizations commit to culture or DEI work, Kellie notes, without asking how to operationalize it. Her recommended path has three steps. First, set clear expectations and resurface them often, even at the risk of sounding like a broken record, and name the specific behaviors that support or work against each value rather than leaving a word like respect open to interpretation.

Second, give people the resources and training to actually meet those expectations, because it is unfair to hold someone accountable for a skill they were never taught. Third, build structures of accountability, which she calls the hardest step of all.

When a rainmaker is allowed to undercut the culture with no consequence, employees quickly learn how much the stated values really matter. That, Kellie says, is the moment trust is either reinforced or eroded in front of everyone watching.

What a DEI lens adds as an organization scales

Many companies build a genuinely good organic culture early, almost always a testament to strong leadership. The trouble starts as they grow and senior leaders lose direct contact with employees, letting microcultures form that drift from the original norms.

A more formalized DEI structure, which Kellie describes as a lens or a layer on top of the work, keeps culture scalable and present across every layer of the organization. It also guards against a common blind spot: a culture designed around a few types of people can feel great to them and alienating to everyone else as the team diversifies. A one-off seminar cannot fix that, because workshops only address the behavioral side while the systemic side goes untouched.

Is HR the owner or the custodian of culture

Nicole asks whether HR should be seen as custodians of engagement rather than owners, and Kellie strongly agrees. Culture is not a siloed practice HR can carry alone; it is shared ownership with leaders and managers, with HR acting as a strong resource and an innovative partner rather than only a risk mitigator.

To make shared ownership real, Kellie borrows the idea of civic engagement. Just as citizens are expected to contribute, employees who benefit from a good culture have a duty to help shape it. The practical move is to give people options rather than mandates.

Can technology make DEI measurable

Technology earns its place in two areas, Kellie says. The first is listening. HR tech has exploded, and tools now gather feedback anonymously, annually, and through the constant read on sentiment that a pulse survey is built for, which matters even more in remote settings where no one can simply walk into the HR office.

The second is tracking data. DEI has too often felt intangible because, unlike other parts of the business, its initiatives are launched without a clear goal or any measurement of impact. Kellie's example is the team that starts employee resource groups without knowing what those groups are meant to achieve. Tracking representation and spotting where people drop out of the funnel turns DEI into something you can manage like any other function.

What keeps people from leaving when things get hard

The final thread ties everything back to listening. Many organizations now survey employees, Kellie observes, but plenty collect feedback and then do nothing with it, which is corrosive to trust. Strong feedback loops, paired with clear processes for how that feedback is used, are what keep people through hard stretches.

People, she argues, can weather adversity far more easily than they can weather uncertainty. When leaders paint a clear path forward and prove their word matters, employees will ride out a storm. When feedback vanishes into a void, hope and trust go with it, and that is when people leave. For an employee-listening platform like CultureMonkey, that is the whole point: real-time sentiment only builds culture when leaders visibly act on what they hear.